2018 Events Archive

This one is on the second Thursday, and starts at 6 PM. The IMUG holiday bash always features unusual food and good conversation, including discussions of language technology, business, travel, life across cultures, and more.

Dr. Ken Lunde and Janice Campbell of the Adobe globalization team have once again graciously offered to host our event, this time at Layers Café in the same East Tower as most of our IMUG talks. Adobe will supply the drinks including soda, wine and spirits.* IMUG will supply free pizza. You needn't bring a thing, but we always look forward to the fantastic variety of ethnic dishes the less culinarily-challenged among us can muster up for this annual food-fest. That always takes things to a higher level.

You needn't prepare or buy more than 3 to 4 portions worth, and in fact you needn't bring anything at all. Come as you are, with or without a potluck contribution, but do come prepared to eat! Adobe Systems will host this event at Layers Café in the Adobe East Tower in downtown San Jose. Many thanks to Dr. Ken Lunde and Janice Campbell for their support!

*Please drink responsibly, and choose a designated driver or take alternate transportation if necessary.

The topic for tonight's talk is TAPICC, a community-driven, open-source initiative to improve through standardization the exchange of data and workflow information in the translation and localization industry. You'll find more information here: https://www.gala-global.org/tapicc

Jim Compton is a localization industry veteran, technologist, and optimist interested in the application of technology toward big picture globalization challenges. As part of RWS Moravia’s Technology Partnerships team, Jim seeks out capabilities that can be leveraged into customer solutions. In his spare time, he likes to make rock music on the Commodore 64

Renato Beninatto, CEO and co-founder of market research and international consulting company Nimdzi, will offer insights into the language services industry's translation technology landscape, based on new research and his decades of experience.

Renato has served on the executive teams of some of the localization industry’s most prominent companies. He develops strategies that drive growth on a global scale. He specializes in making companies successful in global markets and in starting businesses that span across borders. His expertise combines sales, marketing, content strategies with P&L responsibility, having helped companies dramatically increase revenues in short periods of time.

A native Brazilian living in Seattle, Renato speaks five languages and has lived in seven countries. He is the author of three books on global business, and founded Nimdzi Insights to provide insights to investors, analysts, buyers and suppliers of language services.

IMUG is proud to once again partner with GALA on a local networking evening! Come for a tempting buffet, cash bar, and fine conversation with your GILT industry friends and colleagues on the private patio at Steins Beer Garden in Mountain View. Free public parking is available at surface lots or parking garages less than one block in any direction, and we'll be just a few blocks from the Mountain View CalTrain station too. Look for the intersection of Villa and Bryant on this map: http://mountainviewdowntown.com/parking-map/

Per GALA guidelines: no sponsorships, no selling, no suits = no pressure! GALA local networking events are intended as relaxed, non-commercial gatherings. This is one of the many ways GALA carries out its mission to bring the industry together to share information, foster innovation among GALA members and the industry as a whole, and to offer clients collaborative value.

The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) is the world's largest trade association for the language industry with over 400 member companies in more than 50 countries. As a non-profit organization, GALA provides resources, education, advocacy, and research for thousands of global companies. GALA's mission is to support our members and the language industry by creating communities, championing standards, sharing knowledge, and advancing technology. For more information: www.gala-global.org

Writing UI in a way such that text can be accurately translated often comes with tradeoffs. If the text is sufficiently complicated, engineers have to take great pains (write many conditionals, which they often get wrong) to ensure it is accurately rendered in other languages. Additionally, engineers are often either required to (a) keep strings separate from UI, or (b) keep translatable text simple enough to be extracted from UI source.

Fbt is an explicit markup language that tackles complexity and keeps UI text bundled with the relevant source code. This has the added benefit of keeping UI source self-documenting. This markup is parsed at build-time and the text is collected and sent to translators. The framework enables engineers to write text that would normally be tedious and error-prone in a succinct and accurate way. For example, writing numbers that cover the plural cases correctly is a simple matter of using the <fbt:plural> tag.

We’ll be open sourcing our JavaScript framework, fbt, very soon. This is a preview of that framework.

About the speaker:

John Watson has been at Facebook for nearly 6 years and has been working on the i18n team at Facebook for the last 3 years. He is well-known internally as an expert on multiple complex JS frameworks and is the engineer who brought the magic of fbt markup to JavaScript engineers at Facebook and is responsible for its open source release. The i18n server-side infrastructure at Facebook was one of the first things that had impressed him when he first joined Facebook, and this was what inspired him to bring a similar developer experience to the JavaScript codebase.

Movies, series, documentaries, kids programming, food competition shows: every piece of Netflix Original content is supported by up to 50+ trailers that can live anywhere from our Netflix UI to social media and even VR. Come and learn about what it takes to create trailers in 20+ languages for audiences around the world for hundreds of Netflix Originals every year, and meet the team behind this global effort!

Localization planning follows a well-worn path: You adapt websites, products, and services for the locales with the highest GDP and return on investment, then work your way down the economic ladder with the development funds that remain. That approach pleases well-heeled users today, but leave many others on the outside looking in. As smartphones, smarter feature phones, and devices driven by and connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), that calculus will change. These innovations will place more communications, connectivity, and computing power in the hands of a much broader, more economically diverse population around the world. With that ubiquity will come rapidly increasing demand for localized products and services that meet the needs and expectations of people speaking hundreds of languages. As they support these new users, companies will have to make fundamental changes in core product development and localization practices.

CSA Research founder Don DePalma will outline the essential and growing role of language in the user experience for current, new, and yet-to-appear devices for the next billion or two users. He share data describing how it will result in changing demand for language services and technology. In turn, he will outline the impact of evolving and revolutionary UX models on language service and technology providers. Learn what you need to do to keep pace with the next wave of globalization demand from markets your organization is not currently serving.

Don DePalma has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of technology, language services, and market research. As Common Sense Advisory’s (CSA Research) original founder, he is responsible for launching and developing the preeminent market research firm in the language services sector. Prior to founding CSA Research, he co-founded Interbase Software, served as vice president of corporate strategy at translation technology supplier Idiom Technologies, and was one of the first analysts at Forrester Research where he launched the firm's coverage of content management, application development for strategic internet systems, digital marketing technologies and customer relationship management, knowledge management, and business globalization. His book “Business without Borders” is widely used at university and business training courses.

Don holds a PhD in Linguistics from Brown University with specializations in generative grammar, computational linguistics, and the historical phonology of Slavic languages. He has also studied at Moscow State University and Moscow Linguistic University in Russia, Univerzita Karlova in the Czech Republic, and ILISA in Costa Rica.

This case study describes the 3-year journey of the eBay Language Quality Assurance (LQA) team: from its initial setup to the establishment of an automated testing process. This session will cover our challenges to support and manage an ever increasing demand, as well their solves using automation in conjunction with a comprehensive Dashboard. As a result of these efforts, we reduced testing costs by 75%, turning a positive ROI within 1 year of implementation.

About the speaker:

Zoe Lin is part of the eBay Localization management team, and has been the eBay Language Quality Assurance Manager since March 2016. She has seventeen years of experience in localization and globalization, specializing in project & program management, vendor relations, L10n operations, and testing automation. She started out her career in localization as Project Manager at SDL, then joined eBay as a Language Specialist for Traditional Chinese. Prior to re-joining eBay in her current role, she was the Vendor & Program Manager at the PayPal Globalization department.

Zoe holds a degree in Translation & Interpretation from what was the Monterey Institute of International Studies (now 'Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey').

This presentation is intended to convey technical details of how the “Ten Mincho” — 貂明朝 in Japanese — typeface and its fonts, which is the latest Adobe Originals Japanese typeface design whose fonts were released at the end of 2017, were developed, and how they “boldly go where no Japanese font has gone before.”

The many ways in which the Ten Mincho fonts are unique or different from conventional Japanese fonts will be explored, such as the glyph set and Unicode coverage, kanji repertoire, incredibly rich Latin support to include italics, an incredibly large number of OpenType features some of which are language-sensitive, Unicode variation sequences, and even color SVG glyphs. The deployment format, which includes a separate style-linked italic face, is a space-efficient OpenType Collection.

About the speaker:

Dr. Ken Lunde has worked at Adobe for over twenty-five years specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he develops East Asian fonts, along with the specifications on which they are based. He architected the Adobe-branded "Source Han" and Google-branded "Noto CJK" open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014 and 2017, is the author of "CJKV Information Processing" Second Edition that was published by O'Reilly Media at the end of 2008, and frequently publishes articles on Adobe's CJK Type Blog. His most recent speaking engagements include "Face/Interface: Type Design and HCI Beyond the Western World" (Stanford University, December 2017), IUC40 (Santa Clara, November 2016), and at a JCITPC seminar (Tokyo, October 2016).

Fulani (aka Pulaar) may be the largest language you've never heard of. But over 25 million people in 24 countries across Africa rarely wrote or read their own language until two young teenagers in 1990 invented a new alphabet, now called Adlam.

They spent years manually writing books and training people to read and write in Adlam. In 2008 they developed a keyboard and non-standard font encoding based on Arabic. Finally in 2016, the Unicode standard added the Adlam script. But then what?

Fast forward to January 2018 for the 3rd Adlam Conference in Mamou and Labé, Guinea, where hundreds of children and adults excitedly cheered, sang, and applauded speech after speech. But this was not a political rally or a product launch or a sports event. They were celebrating their language, their alphabet, and literacy.

Come learn why this language and alphabet are "a big deal". Hear how the brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry began Adlam, enduring prison, discouragement, and hostility. Learn how Unicode, fonts, and keyboards enable, but don’t guarantee, usability of a script. And get a glimpse of how modern language technology will support Adlam, "the alphabet that will save a people".

Speakers:

Craig Cornelius is a member of the International Engineering group at Google, Inc., working with the Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate, and other projects. He continues his work with the Cherokee Nation, and recently joined the Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council's Center of Excellence on the Dynamics of Language. He has held academic and industry positions over many years, but his Ph.D. in Chemistry has almost nothing to do with i18n.

Plus two special guests via video link!

Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry, brothers from Guinea in West Africa, are the creators of the Adlam alphabet for the Fulani and other African languages. They are members of the Winden Jangen Organization for the promotion of Adlam, and the North American Fulani and Friends Association (NAFFA), and currently live in Portland, Oregon.

Ibrahima Barry works on the Adlam alphabet, perfecting its style and design. He has written many books, including a comprehensive grammar and orthography book for the Fulani language, and he is also working on the first Fulani dictionary in Adlam. He holds a BS in Civil Engineering and Mathematics from Portland State University, and currently works for the US Postal Service.

Abdoulaye Barry is passionate about education and development issues in Guinea and how they relate to language. He is also doing research on the different Fulani dialects and has written or translated books on grammar, religion, short stories and current topics. He has a BS in Financial Management from the University of Conakry and MS in Financial Analysis from Portland State University, and works for the Public Utility Commission of Oregon.

Translation Commons is a nonprofit established to share tools, resources, and initiatives that unite the language community and encourage cross-functional collaboration. Translation Commons brings together the expertise of the world's language engineers, linguists, academics and professionals in programs to educate, support, and provide access to free translation and localization tools.

A self-managed volunteer community, Translation Commons aims to correct imbalances in the supply chain by endowing translators, interpreters and other localization professionals with the respect that they deserve. It fosters collaboration, responds to the needs of people using endangered and minority languages, and is targeted to the needs of language service professionals and students. In short, Translation Commons is bridging the gap between academia and industry.

In this presentation you will learn of all the diverse programs, projects and community working groups as well as a step by step demo of all the platform functionalities.

About the speakers:

Jeannette Stewart is the founder of Translation Commons. She is also founder and former CEO of CommuniCare, a leading global translation company specializing in Life Sciences. Since selling CommuniCare she has actively participated in industry associations and conferences as lecturer and advocate for the language industry. She writes the "Community Lives" column in Multilingual Magazine on Language Community Initiatives. Jeannette has also served on the Board of Directors, moderated and volunteered in a number of educational and health charities in the US and the UK.

Jean Aurambault is a globalization engineer at Pinterest. He has over five years of experience working on localization platforms, starting at Yahoo!, Box and now Pinterest. As a full stack engineer, Jean has been working on building and integrating localization tools as well as driving internationalization efforts to deliver improved global products. He is the creator of Mojito, an open source platform for continuous localization, and a founding member of the Translation Commons Advisory Board.